Today, 3.3 million Americans over the age of 40 are blind or have low-vision—a number that will surpass 5 million within the next decade. In addition, over 21 million Americans have profound visual impairments that require large print documents. A vast majority of these individuals have bank accounts, credit cards, and savings in various investment vehicles that require monthly statements. However, these individuals often are unable to access the financial statements that are typically provided.
Many visually impaired individuals use assistive technologies to access digital information. Such assistive technologies range from screen readers to Braille printers. However, many documents and websites are not designed to be compatible with assistive technologies.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed guidelines for technology products. These Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) state that websites, software products and electronic documents should be built to work with assistive technologies.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is the most commonly used document format in electronic statements. However, this document format has presented one of the most problematic accessibility issues. A number of organizations have been working to address this issue by outlining the appropriate tagging requirements.
Currently, tagging of PDF documents is manually performed on a per-document basis. Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming and tedious process. There also fails to be a mechanism for tagging of documents that are stored in electronic formats other than PDF.
In view of the above, it would be beneficial if an improved process for tagging documents could be developed.